Dear Colleagues,

Alongside the well-known concepts of efficiency and decarbonization, the energy transition must be guided by sustainability and resilience objectives. There is a need to define proper strategies to guarantee energy accessibility, affordability, acceptability, availability, and security. Accessibility is one of the components of intra-generational and intra-national equity. Urban, national, and supra-national energy management requires ensuring physical accessibility to energy sources and access to other types of services such as tools, labor and technologies needed for the provision of high quality and environmentally friendly energy. Accessibility can also be investigated from an economic point of view, as it is important to investigate how affordable the access to energy and resources is. Ensuring that everyone can meet their energy needs at a reasonable cost must be a priority, especially in cases of often-costly high-tech investments needed to facilitate the transition to low-carbon and resilient societies. In addition, social sciences in recent years have made efforts to understand the implications of human activities and not to compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Due to its significant impact, the built environment is recognized as a key player in the energy transition framework. Therefore, the process of renovation of the existing building stock and of construction of new buildings should be guided by these aspects. Specifically, renovation and construction approaches should consider the need to deliver resilient buildings and cities, increasing their adaptability to changes, always pursuing the objectives of energy saving and sustainability. Analyzing the built environment transition from a multi-domain perspective, the concept of resilience not only refers to the need of buildings and cities to adapt to extreme weather events (e.g., increment of external temperatures, severe natural hazards, etc.), which have been significantly increased due to climate change effects, but can be extended to the capability to adapt to a wide range of possible shocks, involving energy, environmental, sociopolitical, and economic aspects. In this framework, the exploitation of smartness is important, allowing us to optimize building operations and to improve their positive interaction with energy systems, providing higher flexibility and reliability to energy networks.

The Special Issue welcome papers that address the issue of:

- Designing resilient buildings to find an answer to climate change, integrated with the urban/rural context and able to reduce their impact on the environment;

- Proposing solutions involving the whole community in a process of urban regeneration that focuses on improving the energy behavior of the built environment;

- Developing the concept of energy resilience within cities to encourage the adoption of renewable energy sources, together with the achievement of significant energy savings and of environmental sustainability and energy efficiency;

- Analyzing the various scales of energy resilience definitions and implications within the built environment, from single building, to community, to city level;

- Investigating sustainable finance instruments and energy policies to support the energy transition of the private sector.

All original research articles and reviews that address energy resilience and sustainability, and not necessarily limited to the list above, are welcome.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Giulia Crespi
Dr. Federico Dell’Anna
Guest Editors

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• resilience
• sustainability
• energy transition
• built environment
• building
• district
• city
• energy community
• energy systems
• policy and regulation
• sustainable finance
• resilience plan
• resilience finance
• energy resilience